Syncretic Brush

The Syncretic Brush embeds an accelerometer, gyroscope, magentometer, and haptic feedback motor controlled by a TI DRV2605L into a Simply Simmons XL Stiff Synthetic Round 50 brush. A Teensy LC board is used in MIDI mode to make the brush easily plugged and played in a wide variety of software. A haptic sequence occurs on startup, indicating that the brush is active. On MIDI channel 10, MIDI CC elements 10 thru 15 send accelerometer values at 8G range and gyroscopic values at 2000DPS; MIDI CC elements 20 thru 25 send more sensitive values (2G / 500DPS), while MIDI CC 30 is reserved for sending haptic feedback codes to the brush.

Special thanks to the very talented Shahab Sagheb, who completed all machining aspects of this project, including cutting the brush, hollowing the center, drilling a hole down the center of the brush, and creating custom laster-cut rigs for doing these tasks with extreme precision.

Granular | Neopixel Ring | WiFi

Palimpsest

Palimpsest is based on a Hex Schmitt Trigger. The open housing is laser-cut MDF with pressure-inserted columns. Features current "starving," capacitor "drain" switch, an opto-isolation strobe, and diode mixing.

Beat Extractor

Beat extractor, distortion box, and visualizer. Uses a CD4049 inverter responsive to audio input, creating a pulse wave counted by a CD4040 binary divider. Rotary switches allow selection of divider outputs. Output from the CD4040 also reaches a CD4046 phase-locked loop that attempts to track the pitch of the signal. Three external modulation outputs. Excellent for gating/crushing drum and bass lines, and for visualization of audio signals.

Cigar Box Instruments

These instruments are built into the Darice8.375" x 8.125" x 1.75" craft box. The surface is thin enough to allow pots and toggles to be screwed in, but sturdy enough for strong hand pressure and performance. I recommend this enclosure to the students in my hardware courses. The two instruments displayed here are a matrix mixer and a touch-sensitive sequencer with breakout pins for an external resistor matrix.

Hacked Toys

Circuit-bent "groovy tunes" with substituted clock resistor, circuit-bent toy guitar, spring monoverb built from a toy "echo" microphone and an old radio enclosure, and a hacked resistor matrix used to control the clock rate of a homemade sequencer.